How to: Make your own Mods

[funforfree99 5]

The most up to date version of ilive reader is necesary, check the mods page of http://simtropolis.com for this program.

How to back up simcity_1.dat

1. Find it in your program files and then maxis then simcity 4.

2. copy the file to your desktop and leave it there.

3. If anything goes wrong simply replace this file.

Lesson 1. Creating ordinances that bring in 5000 per resident.

1. Open your ilive reader and load simcity_1.dat

2. Open the analyser click tree then search

3. Find the plus sign beside ordinances and open it

4. search for the ordinance named smoke detectors

5. click it and in the data that appears on the left choose cost per resident double click this info line and edit the value that can be edited. ( a negative number means you are losing money for purpose of this lesson change it to 50000)

6. While we are here lets also change the flamability rating. Find the line named % effect on flamabillity and change it. (1 = normal flamability 0= no flamability 100000=super flamability)

7. close analyser and save

8. Test out the patch

Coming soon how to increase fire radius.

[funforfree99 5]

Hello fellow modders.

 

Here I present lesson 2. Fire/police station mods

 

1. As detailed above get to examplar trees.

2. Find the plus sign beside civic buildings and enter it.

3. Find large fire (or large police) station and double click it

4. Lets start with radius. Double click radius of effect and edit the value to 11111. clack apply and lets make this a strong radius.

5. You should be able to find two other radius values (center and outer strength) simply edit these two to be equal (using of course your center valueas both)

6. Now to add more trucks BE WARNED. THIS COULD CRASH YOUR GAME IF YOU GO OVERBOARD WITH NUMBERS.

7. Find fire: trucks and change its value to 0x00000099

8. Find no to dispatch and change its value to 0x99

9. apply all changes and save your file.

 

Coming soon: lesson 3. Editing traffic capacity.

[funforfree99 5]

Welcome to yet another installment of how to mod your game. If anyone wants to give me feedback on how I'm doing feel free.

 

Lesson 3. The modding of traffic systems.

 

1. Usual start up. Get to the  examplar tree.

2. Open the plus sign named simulator.

3. Open examplar traffic simulator (hard that).

4. Considering that we have only worked with one value so far think of this as the next stage. Find the value named walk speed (road,rail etc)

5. Open this and Take a guess at a good speed for people to walk at. repeat through all values. 

 

LEAVE ALL VALUES THAT ARE SET AT 0 AT 0

 

6. Move on to the next line car speed and repeat 5. Continue this for bus, truck, frieght pass rail and subway.

7.One more value to edit and that is capacity. Change these to adequat figures once again leaving 0's at 0.

8. Apply, save and test.

 

Congrats another home made mod to go into your collection.

 

Next lesson: Your personal choice send in ideas to this thread and I will find any I know how to do and show them.

Have fun!

[HellBlazer 0]

hey i cant find any simulator in the examplar tree.

[Duane 0]

You can also right-click and choose find...
Search for traffic sim

[HellBlazer 0]

oh i was using v4.3, dint notice tht this was for v4.5 sorry abt tht i found it now. and also whts the property for the treatment plant for how much water is treated?

[screename 0]

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On 5/26/2003 2:51:04 AM funforfree99 wrote:

Ilive reader is necesary

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were can i get Ilive reader?

[DarkWarriorXII 3]

in the Mods section of the site. go down to programs. its there.

[toroca 160]

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On 5/26/2003 2:51:04 AM funforfree99 wrote:

5. click it and in the data that appears on the left choose cost per resident double click this info line and edit the value that can be edited. ( a negative number means you are losing money for purpose of this lesson change it to 50000)

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Does that actually work? I tried to make a legalize gambling ordinance that was based on population instead of a flat income. It never changed anything, but I didn't try playing with the other ordinances, because it wouldn't make sense for them to provide an income...

[funforfree99 5]

Does that actually work?  I tried to make a legalize gambling ordinance that was based on population instead of a flat income.  It never changed anything, but I didn't try playing with the other ordinances, because it wouldn't make sense for them to provide an income...

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I've been looking at this and I think that the non income mods may be your only option I'll keep checking though. Maybe you could make high flamability and high costing fire alarms this *almost* balances it out. (get ready for lots of fires)

[funforfree99 5]

Lesson 4. Water Purification edits.

 

1.  Get to examplar tree and find water.

2. Choose water TREATMENT (not prurification) plant

3. I think someone asked for how to remove the water it uses. So find water consumed and double click it and edit it to 0x00000000

4. Apply and either save or edit water produced from 0x00000000 to 0x00004E20 to get 20000 units of water. (maybe)

5. If you want to change price edit plop cost to 0x00000000000001F4 (price of wind plant)

6. Quit and save then test

[Minotaur420 2]

I think I figured out how to lower the cost of grass to $2, but I was too worried to save, lol.

[ilive 36]

thanks a lot for all these tutorials , funforfree99

 

[funforfree99 5]

Hi again.

 

Lesson 5 Landmark mods

 

1. Get to examplar tree and find landmarks

2. Find the empire state building and open it's details.

3. Choose plop cost and edit it's value to 0x0000000000000096 ( thats

[funforfree99 5]

Well here it comes.

Lesson number 7. The airport modifications

 

1. Find examplar tree.

2. Choose transport and search within it for small international airport.

3. Once again lets lower the plop cost to 0x0000000000000000

4. Now lets find capacity and edit it from the default of 0x00011170 to 0x00099999 (default to a seriously high number that I have no idea of the value of)

5. Copy the last stages for medium and large internationals

6. Quit, save and be ready to test.

 

Only 3 more lessons and once again I'm open for suggestions.

[Duane 0]

Making everything free makes for a very boring game.
No challenge.

I guess I like it more difficult.
My airport mod raises the capacities, but also raises the cost. I can still make a good profit, and still keep it challenging.

Making things too easy defeats the whole purpose of the game.
Free grass? Can you plant a lawn for free at home?

[dolemitesim 0]

How about modifying the traffic so it high in the commercial areas, but low commute times overall, this way the comm areas still have high traffic without the long commute times. In addtion you should put your lessons in MS Word that way all member can read it and learn from it. Then they can download it form the forums, and save it to their computer. Thanx

[SirTokalot 0]

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On 5/28/2003 2:34:13 PM dolemitesim wrote:

How about modifying the traffic so it high in the commercial areas, but low commute times overall, this way the comm areas still have high traffic without the long commute times.

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The best way I have found to deal with this is to not make streets with a super capacity and then leave streets in and around your commercial areas. You can raise the capacities on everything else, but I would not recommend it for streets.

[Duane 0]

I have been playing a bit with that. Keeping the capacity down while increasing speeds may be the answer. I still have a bit of experimenting to do, decreasing the capacity will raise commute times a little, but will also get the red roads back that comm likes.
I am still trying to find the "perfect" combination. I like it to remain somewhat realistic, so I am trying not to get 100mph speeds on roads.
Right now my commute times range from 60-130 minutes in a region of about 15 cities and just over 1 million population.

[funforfree99 5]

O.k time to answer the questions.

1. To duane. I am using rather extreme examples in order for people to see the effects instantly i their game. Of course they will be extreme but It is very hard to show the increase's and effects if I do fine tuning. Theredore for the tutorials I shall create "radical" mods.

2. To dolemite sim.

a) As suggested by sir tokkalot simply use roads everywhere else and streets used for commercial.

b) There is a chance that when I reach 10 tutorials I will end up in the omnibus.

 

Thankyou for your interest in this project please continue with requests.

[TEBB_Dipsy 13]

Your tips is great!!!!

1 thing i whant to know is if there is a way to change the amount of people that lives in a building

[+Guest]

_great_ topic funforfree99! This is really helpful. I dislike the dowloadable mods because I can't specify the properties myself, and now I can! I have full control! Thanks!

//edit: btw, I do have a request:
How do you mod Capacity of buildings? Personally I think having like 6 large hospitals with helipads and everything in a 100,000 way over the top, I'd like to have less. But besides changing the radius I need to adjust the patient capacity. Do you know how to do this?
There are properties like "Capacity, user visible text", "Patient Cap, used value", and I don't know which to use.

[funforfree99 5]

Now for another magnificent radical mod.

 

Lesson 8. The school/Clinic mods

 

1. From examplar tree we want to get to civic buildings

2. Find large medical centre and find the value named capacity, user visible text.

3. Open it and put in 0x00009999 repeat this for the other value that begins with patient cap.

4. For any inquisitive types there is a radius to be increased (see above) and a new value named HQ boost (EQ if school building) This can be edited as high as you want health to go. Also find sfx, plop cost, and power and water consumed values both of which can be changed to 0x00000000.

 

5. Save, quit and test

 

Thank you once again for finding time to view my thread.

[+Guest]

Lol, at the time I was editing my previous post you already answered my request! Can you read my mind?

Thanks again!

[+Guest]

By the way: here is a nice little Decimal/Hexadecimal converter to calculate values. For example, I wanted my Medical Center to have a Patient Capacity of 9000, so I entered 2328 as value for Capacity and Patient Cap. in the dat-file.

[funforfree99 5]

Well here comes the lesson number nine

 

Lesson 9. Editing low wealth building numbers.

 

1. Get an examplar tree open

2. Find residential

[+Guest]

Hmm, somehow I did something very wrong: after editing the large medical clinic capacity and radius, the simulator went crazy: demands for everything but ID went through the roof, so highrises shot out of the ground, and somehow I got 2 zoning buttons for every type (low-density Res. and such).

What did I do wrong?

[+Guest]

I can't restore this by restoring my original SimCity_1.dat .. something really f-ed up my installation

Is this restorable without reinstalling the game?

[bo340002 0]

From what I've heard, the simcity_1.dat file is located on the second cd. As for the double-button issue, that seems to happen with only a handful of games, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Bryan

[+Guest]

Thanks Bryan, but even copying that SimCity_1.dat to my game folder and then updating to Patch 2 didn't restore the game .. still double icons and enormous (especially Co$$$) demand raise.
In 2 years the amount of Co$$$-jobs went from 4K to 16K. Kind of funny to see an enormous Lind pop up in a small 5K-town, the entire population wouldn't even fill it up. But this obviously isn't the way I want to play the game.

Even the hospital modifications I put in myself are still there, while they are not visible in the .dat-file. I guess they must be stored somewhere else too?

I guess I'll have to reinstall .. I hope my saved games aren't infected in any way ..